The New York Times - USA (2020-07-31)

0

+

+4%

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–9.5%

2020 2nd qtr.

G.D.P. Change from previous quarter

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis

VIRUS WIPES OUT 5 YEARS OF ECONOMIC GROWTH

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ATLANTA — Three former presidents and dozens of other dignitaries were drawn to Ebene- zer Baptist Church on Thursday to bid farewell to John Lewis, a giant of Congress and the civil rights era whose courageous protests guaranteed him a place in Ameri- can history. But even as the funeral looked back over Mr. Lewis’s long life, it also focused very much on the tumultuous state of affairs in the country today. The most pointed eulogy came from former President Barack Obama, who issued a blistering critique of the Trump administra-

tion, the brutality of police officers toward Black people and efforts to limit the right to vote that Mr. Lewis had shed his blood to se- cure. The political tone of the ceremo- ny came as little surprise. Mr. Lewis, who died July 17 at the age of 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, had spent more than three decades in Congress as a thorn in the side of Republican administra- tions. And he and President Trump had traded public slights

since before Mr. Trump took office. Mr. Obama compared Mr. Lewis to an Old Testament prophet and credited him with directly paving the way for the nation’s first Black president. He also took aim at the forces that he said were working against the equality for Black Americans and other oppressed people that Mr. Lewis had spent a lifetime championing. “Bull Connor may be gone,” Mr. Obama said, referring to the 1960s-era public safety commis- sioner of Birmingham, Ala., who turned fire hoses and dogs on civil rights protesters. “But today, we witness, with our own eyes, police

In Atlanta, a Final Salute to an American Giant

By RICHARD FAUSSET and RICK ROJAS

At Lewis Funeral, Calls

to Defend the Vote

An honor guard carried the body of John Lewis out of Ebenezer Baptist Church on Thursday.

POOL PHOTO BY ALYSSA POINTER

Continued on Page A

Torrential rains have sub- merged at least a quarter of Bang- ladesh, washing away the few things that count as assets for some of the world’s poorest people — their goats and chickens, houses of mud and tin, sacks of rice stored for the lean season. It is the latest calamity to strike the delta nation of 165 million people. Only two months ago, a cy- clone pummeled the country’s southwest. Along the coast, a rising sea has swallowed entire vil- lages. While it’s too soon to ascertain what role climate change has played in these latest floods, Bangladesh is already witnessing a pattern of more severe and more frequent river flooding than in the past along the mighty Brahmapu-

Torrent of Rain

Floods a Fourth

Of Bangladesh

By SOMINI SENGUPTA and JULFIKAR ALI MANIK

Jamalpur in flooding that has killed dozens in Bangladesh.

MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/REUTERS

LONDON — European Union leaders are pursuing a new law to make it illegal for Amazon and Ap- ple to give their own products preferential treatment over those of rivals that are sold on their on- line stores. In Britain, officials are drawing up a law to force Facebook to make its services work more easi- ly with rival social networks, and to push Google to share some search data with smaller competi- tors. And in Germany, authorities are debating a rule that would let regulators essentially halt certain business practices at the tech companies during an antitrust in- vestigation. Europe’s lawmakers and regulators have shifted to a new stage in their battle to limit the power of the world’s biggest tech companies. The region has long been at the forefront of using existing antitrust laws and levying multi- billion dollar penalties against the tech giants, but officials now say that those tactics have not gone far enough in altering the behav- ior of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. So they are drafting at least half a dozen new laws and regulations to aim at the heart of how those tech companies’ businesses work. Europe has embarked on its legal blitz just as the United States has started flexing its own tech regulatory muscles. On Wednes- day, the chief executives of Ama-

Europe Tries

New Strategy

To Limit Tech

By ADAM SATARIANO

WASHINGTON — The na-
tion’s cities were in flames amid
protests against racial injustice
and the fiery presidential candi-
date vowed to use force. He
would authorize the police to
“knock somebody in the head”
and “call out 30,000 troops and
equip them with two-foot-long
bayonets and station them every
few feet apart.”
The moment was 1968 and the
“law and order” candidate was
George C. Wallace, the former
governor of Alabama running on
a third-party ticket. Fifty-two
years later, in another moment of
social unrest, the “law and or-
der” candidate is already in the
Oval Office and the politics of
division and race ring through
the generations as President
Trump tries to do what Wallace
could not.
Comparisons between the two
men stretch back to 2015 when
Mr. Trump ran for the White
House denouncing Mexicans
illegally crossing the border as
rapists and pledging to bar all
Muslims from entering the coun-
try. But the parallels have be-
come even more pronounced in
recent weeks after the killing of
George Floyd as Mr. Trump has
responded to demonstrations by
sending federal forces into the
streets to take down “anarchists

Wielding Fear,

Wallace’s Way

The Politics of Division

Echo in Trump’s Words

NEWS ANALYSIS

By PETER BAKER

The coronavirus pandemic’s toll on the nation’s economy became emphatically clearer Thurs- day as the government detailed the most devastating three-month collapse on record, which wiped away nearly five years of growth. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced, fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year as consumers cut back spending, businesses pared investments and global trade dried up, the Commerce Department said. The drop — the equivalent of a 32.9 percent annual rate of decline — would have been even more severe without trillions of dollars in government aid to households and businesses. But there is mounting evidence that the attempt to freeze the economy and defeat the virus has not produced the rapid rebound that many envisioned. A surge in coronavirus cases and deaths across the country has led to a renewed pullback in economic activity, reflecting consumer unease and renewed shutdowns. And much of the government support is on the verge of running out, with Washington at an impasse over

next steps. “In another world, a sharp drop in activity would have been just a good, necessary blip while we ad- dressed the virus,” said Heather Boushey, president of the Wash- ington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank. “From where we sit in July, we know that this wasn’t just a short- term blip. We did not get the virus under control.” Data from Europe shows what might have been. Germany on Thursday reported a drop in second-quarter G.D.P. that was even steeper than the U.S. decline. But in Germany, coronavirus cases fell sharply and remain low, which has allowed a much stronger economic rebound in recent weeks. In the United States, the rebound appears to have stalled. More than 1.4 million Americans filed new claims for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the 19th straight week that

the tally exceeded one million, an unheard-of figure before the pandemic. A further 830,000 people filed for benefits under the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assist- ance program, which supports freelancers, the self-employed and other workers not covered by traditional unemployment benefits. In total, some 30 million people are receiving unemployment benefits, a number that has come down only slowly as new layoffs — many of them permanent job losses, as opposed to the spring’s temporary furloughs — offset gradual rehiring. Some econo- mists now fear that the monthly jobs report coming next week will show that total employment fell in July after two months of strong gains. The slow recovery, and signs of backsliding, are taking a toll on consumer confidence, which fell in July after rising in June. “Not only have we plateaued, but we may be losing ground,” said Diane Swonk, chief econo- mist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton in Chicago. “To have these kinds of numbers in July when many in Congress hoped this would be over by summer un- derscores how unique and persist- ent the Covid crisis is.” The economic collapse in the

second quarter was unrivaled in its speed and breathtaking in its severity. The decline was more than twice as large as in the Great Recession a decade ago, but oc- curred in a fraction of the time. The only possible comparisons in modern American history came during the Great Depression and the demobilization after World War II, both of which predated

Second-Quarter Contraction Sets a Grim Record

By BEN CASSELMAN Stalled Rebound in U.S.

Makes Outlook Bleak

for Coming Months

For several years, it has been
the stuff of his opponents’ night-
mares: that President Trump,
facing the prospect of defeat in
the 2020 election, would declare
by presidential edict that the
vote had been delayed or can-
celed.
Never mind that no president
has that power, that the timing of
federal elections has been fixed
since the 19th century and that
the Constitution sets an immov-
able expiration date on the presi-
dent’s term. Given Mr. Trump’s
contempt for the legal limits on
his office and his oft-expressed
admiration for foreign dictators,
it hardly seemed far-fetched to
imagine he would at least at-
tempt the gambit.
But when the moment came on
Thursday, with Mr. Trump sug-
gesting for the first time that the
election could be delayed, his
proposal appeared as impotent
as it was predictable — less a
stunning assertion of his author-
ity than yet another lament that

his political prospects have dimmed amid a global public- health crisis. Indeed, his com- ments on Twitter came shortly after the Commerce Department reported that American economic output contracted last quarter at the fastest rate in recorded history, underscoring one of Mr. Trump’s most severe vulnerabilities as he pursues a second term. Far from a strongman, Mr. Trump has lately become a heck- ler in his own government, pro- moting medical conspiracy theo- ries on social media, playing no constructive role in either the management of the coronavirus pandemic or the negotiation of an economic rescue plan in Con- gress — and complaining end- lessly about the unfairness of it all. “It will be a great embarrass- ment to the USA,” Mr. Trump tweeted of the election, asserting

Crises Abound, Yet Trump

Chooses to Attack Election

NEWS ANALYSIS

By ALEXANDER BURNS

But for the pandemic, the world’s elite athletes would again be in Tokyo, trans- formed by design decades ago.PAGE C

WEEKEND C1-

The 1964 Olympics Revisited

NASA’s Perseverance rover lifted off
with its own four-pound experimental
Marscopter on board. PAGE A

NATIONAL A15-

Mars-Bound, With Helicopter

There’s no doubt the virus has hit Na- tive Americans hard, but statistical gaps make it difficult to properly allo- cate resources to fight back. PAGE A

TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-

Blind Spot on Native Americans Now that lawmakers have begun doing their homework, it is unclear if the tech executives’ strategy of giving evasive answers will continue to work on Capi- tol Hill, Kevin Roose writes. PAGE B

BUSINESS B1-

Big Tech Turns Up the Gaslight Herman Cain, who ran a pizza chain before entering politics, became an early supporter of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign. He was 74. PAGE A

OBITUARIES A22-

A 2012 Presidential Hopeful

Kerry James Marshall explores the societal “pecking order” and the Black experience in his paintings. PAGE C

Reimagining Audubon’s Birds

A Covid-19-related bill in New Jersey would free more than 3,000 inmates who are within a year of release. PAGE A

Prisoners Could Be Freed Early

For some leagues, a restricted envi- ronment has proved mostly impervious to an outbreak. But for other leagues, it’s not as feasible. PAGE B

SPORTSFRIDAY B9-

Safely Bubble-Wrapped

Despite the ouster last year of the Sudanese ruler Omar Hassan al-Bashir, militia violence has surged. PAGE A

INTERNATIONAL A11-

Darfur’s Woes Outlast Dictator

Foreign investors have found a way to put money into the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending program, though the rules stipulate that only American companies can participate. PAGE B

Profiting From a U.S. Crisis

David Brooks PAGE A

A new prosecutor had reopened the EDITORIAL, OP-ED A24-
inquiry into a police officer’s shooting of
Michael Brown in 2014. PAGE A

No Charges in Ferguson Killing

Printed in Chicago $3.

Mostly sunny north. Clouds and sunshine south. Highs from mid-70s to lower 80s. Clear to partly cloudy tonight. Lows upper 50s to mid-60s. Weather map is on Page B8.

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The New York Times - USA (2020-07-31)

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